Brown urged to give Nigeria back its cash

Campaigners are urging Gordon Brown to return a £900m repayment Britain received from Nigeria on Friday.

Africa's most populous state struck a historic deal with Paris Club creditors last year under which £10bn of its £17bn debt would be written off in exchange for a £7bn downpayment from oil revenues. But campaigners say Britain and its fellow creditors should not be taking cash from a country where one in five children die before their fifth birthday.

'It's quite outrageous for the UK to be campaigning vociferously for debt relief, and taking such a large sum of money from such a poor country,' said Romilly Greenhill of Action Aid.

As the largest creditor, the Treasury is due to receive a total of £1.7bn from Nigeria over the next few months - more than Britain's entire annual aid budget for Africa.

Nigeria has never qualified for multilateral debt relief, and Brown said at last month's meeting of G8 finance ministers in London that the oil-rich state had 'lots of potential wealth' and pointed out that Nigeria had willingly signed up to the deal.

Caroline Pearce of the Jubilee Debt Campaign said the government had so far offered little response to the pleas of debt campaigners and church leaders for Britain to set a precedent by refusing to take funds from the African state. 'There's been resounding silence,' she said.

The Treasury claims that returning the payments would force it to cut back its overseas aid plans, but Pearce said 'this is extra money coming into the Treasury, and it's a political decision what to do with it.'

A Treasury spokesman said: 'It's difficult to question the Chancellor's commitment to debt relief: he's been pushing the agenda for years, and achieving results.'

The cash will show up in the public finances by the time of the Budget. About a third of it will score as current revenue, helping to reduce the Chancellor's budget deficit, and the rest will be offset against government borrowing. But the spokesman insisted the arrival of the £1.7bn payment was not a windfall. 'At the same time as we're receiving money, we're writing off more debt,' he said.

Other countries are also due to receive payments from Nigeria over the next few months, and debt campaigners in France, the Netherlands and the US have joined a global chorus of demands for the money to be returned.